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Board Hours


Guest Br4nd0nW

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I think "board hours" be a nice feature to include into IP.Board 3. A description of what I mean is that you could specify when you want your board to be open to the public and when you want it to be closed. It would be a good feature for private organizations and schools.

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I thought about that (tasks) I have a suspicion that tasks may not run if the board is offline, but have not actually checked :) , plus they will depend on a bit of activity to work anyway (per page load)

More something for a custom modification or something to use as a Cron job (so they run when they should on time), rather than a direct IPB addition :)

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I can see where this may be a useful feature. Perhaps you have a message board for a school, and there are moderators that moderate the form during school hours, and you want to keep it online only during those hours. The current "board offline" feature uses a boolean 1 or 0 value to determine if the board is offline.. Don't see why adding a couple unix timestamp date fields as an alternative would be such a bad idea.

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Honestly the use of a task for this is a bit overkill. It would be just as easy to do something like if(current_time < open_time and current_time > close_time and close_time > 0) means the board is closed as it would if(closed == 1).

And besides, how many people know how to code a task for this anyway? Unless you want to make the task system be able to handle more than just custom scripts. Have the ability to set a setting to a particular value. That way you could setup two tasks to do this (open and close) without any programming. Could have other useful applications as well ;).

I personally don't need this, but I can see why someone would have the need.

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[b]Honestly the use of a task for this is a bit overkill.[/b] It would be just as easy to [b]do something like if(current_time < open_time and current_time > close_time and close_time > 0) means the board is closed as it would if(closed == 1)[/b].



I think us spending time on a feature that maybe 5 users out of our entire customer base would actually use is overkill personally. ;)
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  • 3 weeks later...

I can hardly see why a school or something would want to restrict the times that people can be online. I dont see why anyone would want hours to be honest. It is not like you keeping the board online all the time is in anyway hurting you or anything. I mean, if someone here can give me one valid reason why such a thing would be imparitive.

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I can hardly see why a school or something would want to restrict the times that people can be online. I dont see why anyone would want hours to be honest. It is not like you keeping the board online all the time is in anyway hurting you or anything. I mean, if someone here can give me one valid reason why such a thing would be imparitive.



Professional company, whose employees (moderators/admins) work 9-5 and outside of those hours there will be nobody online to provide admin/moderation on the forum.


Another example -> http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/interact/message/
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Professional company, whose employees (moderators/admins) work 9-5 and outside of those hours there will be nobody online to provide admin/moderation on the forum.




Another example ->

http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/interact/message/



just make an announcement saying that. But the thing about forums is, that unlike chat, they are not real time. Just because staff is not online, doesnt mean that customers cant post on the forums and then the employees can reply when they get back on. This would make it impossible for people in different time zones and those with tight sceduals to be able to post on that forum, thus causing you to loose customers.
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In a school environment I can see it being very helpful. School moderators are not online in the middle of the night, so the message board is only available during school hours. Just because it isn't something you would use doesn't mean it isn't valid for someone else.

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I can see where this may be a useful feature. Perhaps you have a message board for a school, and there are moderators that moderate the form during school hours, and you want to keep it online only during those hours. The current "board offline" feature uses a boolean 1 or 0 value to determine if the board is offline.. Don't see why adding a couple unix timestamp date fields as an alternative would be such a bad idea.




In a school environment I can see it being very helpful. School moderators are not online in the middle of the night, so the message board is only available during school hours. Just because it isn't something you would use doesn't mean it isn't valid for someone else.



I just noticed that this post received more replies. :P Luke pretty much has it right. I was planning this more for a school website. But I can see no one really cares for the idea so never mind, I'll not bother with this anymore.
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I just noticed that this post received more replies. :P Luke pretty much has it right. I was planning this more for a school website. But I can see no one really cares for the idea so never mind, I'll not bother with this anymore.



I care for it - and I'd use it too. There are times throughout the year when I'd like to be able to schedule the board to be offline but can't...so have to make sure to that someone is online (me) at the times to close and then re-open the board.
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